Senior Staff Engineer, Real-Time Bidding & AI-Driven Backend

Socket.dev; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental & Vision plans

Flexible PTO

401k with employer match

Job summary

TripleLift is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to own the core RTB services for its high-scale exchange. You will design, build, and operate real-time bidding systems, partnering with teams across NYC and Zurich to ensure performance, reliability, and cost efficiency.

Ideal candidates have 5+ years of backend engineering in production-scale environments, strong Java API experience, and deep knowledge of distributed systems, AWS, and modern AI tooling to accelerate delivery while maintaining sound

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in CS or related field or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years of professional software engineering, backend focus.
• Experience building high-performance APIs/services in Java.
• Track record building large-scale, low-latency systems.
• Familiar with in-memory stores (Memcache/Redis) and messaging (Kafka, RabbitMQ).
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems patterns: concurrency, caching, fault tolerance, observability.
• Production experience across multiple AWS regions or comparable clouds.
• Experience with AI coding assistants and when to use them.
• Excellent written and collaborative communication skills.
• Experience with event-driven, non-blocking JVM frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and evolve high-throughput services for bidding logic and auction mechanics.
• Write maintainable, well-tested code with instrumentation and alerts.
• Leverage AI coding assistants to accelerate development while keeping quality high.
• Research AI/ML-driven optimizations and translate ideas to production.
• Collaborate with NYC and Zurich teams to maintain shared standards and response readiness.
• Mentor engineers on Java and distributed systems best practices.

Skills

Java

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

APIs

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science

Tools

Memcache

Redis

Kafka

RabbitMQ

Job description

TripleLift is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to own the core RTB services for its high-scale exchange. You will design, build, and operate real-time bidding systems, partnering with teams across NYC and Zurich to ensure performance, reliability, and cost efficiency.

Ideal candidates have 5+ years of backend engineering in production-scale environments, strong Java API experience, and deep knowledge of distributed systems, AWS, and modern AI tooling to accelerate delivery while maintaining sound